I wrote a review of Grizzly Bear’s very good new album Shields yesterday. Something I couldn’t quite articulate — maybe because it is something that’s so bound up in my personal experience with their two previous albums — is the interplay between “home” and “homelessness” that I hear in their music. Veckatimest in particular captures something about the ecstasy (“In this old house, I’m not alone…/Even wasting my time with you doesn’t matter if I think it through”) and banality (“Take all evening, I’ll just be cleaning”) of domesticity. Shields is something different altogether: intricate enough that it still has its own particular atmosphere and sense of space, but it isn’t built on solid ground. The structure itself feels adrift.

A year after I moved out of the living room and into a room with a door, I worked in a cubicle next to a guy who lived on a house boat. The mornings after stormy nights, he would come into work looking a little grizzled, saying how it was hard to sleep sound on rocky waves, but hey, at least it was a home. Shields feels a little bit like that.

My father watched computers conquer the world, and he did his part to aid in their conquest. He watched punch cards give way to magnetic tape, in fact helped to switch over; he wrote programs for researchers; he did data preparation for Alan Lomax, weighing and assigning variables to data so it could be more easily manipulated, a task that required a great deal of training, even, perhaps, craftsmanship. He learned FORTRAN and became an expert in finding errors in the programs researchers wrote for themselves. He stayed up late underground in Columbia University’s Computer Center, below Uris Hall, playing with computers. He thought it was a joke, or else a piece of true idiocy, when he heard about plans for “computer text manipulation.” Why would you use the enormous computational power of a computer to write?

To hear him tell it, computers in the sixties were something akin to classical music, like a secret club, but an open secret that anyone could learn about if he or she wanted—a haven for interesting, bizarre people, when “nerds were just nerds,” as he put it, “not stars.” The discipline attracted strange characters, many who wanted, like my father, to be free: free time was the watchword of the era. He read articles in self-serious magazines about how people would have so much free time in the future they wouldn’t know what to do with it, and that all this free time would become a grave social problem.

I still think about “Blank Space” (and pop music and pleasure and perfection and) a lot, about how my mother asked me Why’s it called “Blank Space”? and I said, Becausethere’s something inside me I need to fill! It was true, but I was embarrassed about it. I’ll never be a maneater; I’ll never weaponize the parts of me that are soft. Even the way I like to listen to the song, which is imagining not that T wakes up afraid I’ll ruin his life but ablaze with the knowledge I never could, which is pretending that it is in fact at all possible to weaponize being in love or being a supplicant or being the quiet half of an affair, which is the fantasy that my exes sit down by candlelight and tell ghost stories about how hard I cried, all this is still a recognition of powerlessness, of the suffering of the inevitable cycles we find ourselves in. If I couldn’t get control, I was going to sing about it. I tried it once: dated a guy who had no power over me so I planned dates then canceled them, returned some of his e-mails and left others empty, matched his tone once so he’d think my heart was open then played dumb til he went away. You can do that when boys really want torture. Most don’t. If you’re the one waiting for the e-mail, you’re the one with the blank space and emptiness will never be a gun no matter how hard you try. I think about that ending a lot, how he leaves and the new guy pulls up to her big beautiful mansion in his car and she smiles at us like, I’ll never feel full. I’m going to keep eating. Anyway, I’m seeing my boyfriend on Thursday and I’m going to try to have a good time.